Fighting the Xeon SP tide

IBM is bashing out a set of go-faster POWER9 servers in the face of mounting competition from Xeon SP systems.

After unveiling its glam AC922 AI server back in December, Big Blue has released six bread-and-butter POWER9 CPU-based 2U and 4U servers with one or two sockets. They have twice the memory, in general, of their POWER8 forebears, faster internal interconnects, and are pitched at three different OS/system software environments:

Server

Cores

Form Factor

Base SW

DDR4 Memory

PCIe

L922

8/10/12

2U 1-2 socket

Linux

4TB

5 x PCIe G4 (4 CAPI 2.0), 4 x PCIe G3

S914

4/6/8

4U 1 socket

AIX, IBM i, Linux

1TB

2 x PCIe G4 (4 CAPI 2.0), 6 x PCIe G3

S922

4/8/10

2U 1-2 socket

AIX, IBM i, Linux

4TB

5 x PCIe G4 (4 CAPI 2.0), 4 x PCIe G3

S924

8/10/12

4U 2 socket

AIX, IBM i, Linux

4TB

5 x PCIe G4 (4 CAPI 2.0), 6 x PCIe G3

H922

4/8/10

2U 1-2 socket

HANA (25% AIX/IBM i)

4TB

5 x PCIe G4 (4 CAPI 2.0), 6 x PCIe G3

H924

8/10/12

4U 2 socket

HANA (25% AIX/IBM i)

4TB

5 x PCIe G4 (4 CAPI 2.0), 6 x PCIe G3

With the H922 and H924 products, a quarter of the cores can be assigned to AIX or the IBM i OS.

The PCIe gen 4 links double system IO over PCIe gen 3, and cabinet size affects the number of the links as it does the storage capacity:

L922 – 8 x SFF drives

S914 – 12 or 18 x SFF drives

S922 – 8 x SFF drives

S924 – 12 or 18 x SFF drives

H922 – 8 x SFF drives

H924 – 12 or 18 x SFF drives

Apart from the L992, the other five are capable of including internal RDX media, and support 4 x 400GB M.2 NVMe flash drives. The S914 comes in a tower form factor as well as 2U rackmount box, and its core count can be factory deconfigured if fewer cores are needed.

IBM POWER9 S922 server box

S924 server box

There's no obvious way of relating these servers to mainstream Xeon SP-based ones. No doubt benchmarks will emerge later this year.

Get copious IBM documentation, such as that for the H924 and S922 by Googling "IBM + <servername>" – that's much faster than trying to navigate Big Blue's opaque website for specific product information. ®